Context
A home-services business needed a booking platform: customers, technicians, jobs, and invoices, built to be maintained and extended for years, not a one-off script. The chosen framework was Laravel, deployed on the same shared hosting account that ran the rest of the client's WordPress sites.
The challenge
The hosting account's default command-line PHP was a version behind what the framework required, so routine commands failed until the deployment pipeline pointed explicitly at the correct PHP binary — the kind of environment mismatch that silently breaks CI on hosts never designed for a framework like this.